IT Rocks! - Part One

This is kind of a longer rant, so I'll break it up. Given my somewhat unconventional approach to IT, it is probably not surprising that I wasn't always an IT guy. I have really had several careers, and those experiences, plus a couple of strong mentors along the way have formed my approach. More or less in order, I spent eight years in the US Navy (Submarines), three years in commercial nuclear power, three years as a small business owner, two years writing technology sales proposals, and 12 years in software quality.

At the last place I worked (by acquisition, not by choice), the IT group was horrible. They we not the least bit interested in helping the business move forward. All they cared about was compliance with their policy and procedures. Those procedures were often at odds with the needs of the business, and even though I would find folks in the IT group that agreed with me ("You're right, it is stupid") no one was ever willing to work to change the rules. This was quite the shock, as prior to being acquired, we had an IT group that was pretty supportive of the business.

 I was senior enough to have contact with enough of the executive team to know that I wasn't the only one that thought IT sucked, but that it was a common perception. The thing that struck me as odd, was that everyone seemed to believe that you had to live with it, and that big corporate IT just sucked by its very nature, and that all you could do was squeeze their budgets so at least you could pay the minimum for their suckiness.

I was convinced that IT could be done better. It was my belief that if the business felt they were getting good value for their $, you wouldn't be getting squeezed at budget time. Hence, the IT Rocks! theory of IT management was born.

The first day I had responsibility for IT here, I met with my ops director, and talked about how I wanted to approach our delivery. In that first meeting I had two things I wanted to start on right away. First, my new, single metric, if you can call it that, by which I was going to judge the team, was customer satisfaction. How I would measure it, was simple; if I asked any employee in the company, from the CEO on down "How's IT?", the target answer was "IT Rocks!". Minimal acceptable was "They are pretty good". The second thing, and the most important thing in achieving the first, was to stop saying no. No matter what the request, if we thought the answer had to be no, I wanted a good analysis of why, and if it was just because of some policy of ours, I wanted justification of that policy. I even went as far as to say that the only person in IT that could say "no" to a request, was me.

The ops director came just short of laughing at me. It could best describe it as a strong mirthful grin. He said I was nuts, and that he would play it my way, but seeing that I was his fifth boss in three years, this too would pass. As I have related this story to some of my peer CIOs, many have said that that approach can't possibly work. How on earth can the CIO review every request? The reality is that I don't think I even had to review one in the first six months. It was obvious to the team that I wanted them to say yes, so they spent a lot more time understanding what our customers really wanted, that is the problem they were trying to solve when they made the request, and then offered alternative solutions that we could do, instead of jumping straight to "no".

I'll exapand on this more about how it has evolved over the last four years, but the bottom line is that it works. IT does rock. The business loves us. I do not have to fight for budget (there is an interesting budget side effect of IT Rocks that we'll talk about later). Not only does the business love us, but we have added real value, streamlining systems and process to drive more revenue and greater operational efficiency.